Guard Post Tavis sat near the corner of Tavis and Garda streets hence its name. It had been built in the new imperial style, a fashion that grew more common the farther east one traveled in the Empire.

  The building rose four stories high from a broad stone foundation, its walls were of a deep red brick broken by crisp white facades that framed doors, windows, and corners.

  Thick white pilasters climbed the exterior at regular intervals, lending the structure a sense of vertical order, while a heavy cornice crowned the roofline, casting sharp shadows that shifted slowly with the sun.

  Its architecture blended in with the surrounding buildings on the street which like most of the new town district were built in the same style if less ornate.

  Wide stone steps led to the main entrance, where double doors of dark hardwood were banded with iron. Next to the doors was a simple inscription naming the post and district.

  The ground floor of the building served as the public face of the guard post. Inside, the ceiling rose higher than strictly necessary, supported by square columns faced in polished stone.

  A long counter divided the room in half, behind it its surface was worn smooth by decades of paperwork and restless hands. It was here that citizens could have reports filed and complaints lodged.

  It was also where criminals first booked. Iron-barred side rooms were used to hold those awaiting transport.

  A narrow stairwell carried visitors upward to the second floor which was the administrative heart of the post. It was here that rows of offices opened onto a central hall, each filled with filing cabinets, desks, and stacks of carefully labeled case files.

  This was the domain of the dolls who organized the posts reports, transcriptions, and witness statements with tireless efficiency.

  At the far end of the floor lay the office of the post’s sole Inquisitor, a larger room set apart by heavier doors and reinforced wards, where the most complex and troubling cases were reviewed for investigation. The Inquisitor was often the most overworked official in any district.

  As a result, even though policing in the Empire’s major cities was relatively advanced, there were simply not enough Inquisitors to meet demand.

  Most cases, even those involving the nobility went unsolved, buried beneath endless paperwork and more urgent threats.

  The third floor was given over entirely to the jail.

  Cells lined the corridors in orderly rows, their bars reinforced with both iron and runic formations.

  At the top of the building, was the fourth floor which served as the barracks.

  From here, shifts rotated on an eight-hour schedule.

  Sixteen guards were assigned to each rotation with four remaining behind to man the station, monitor reports, and respond to emergencies, while the remaining twelve patrolled their designated sector of the city.

  The primary purpose of the guard towers was not, in fact, policing.

  That was merely a secondary function that was useful for justifying a permanent, twenty-four-hour presence and ensuring the city guard did not grow idle.

  Their true purpose was far more critical: to secure and monitor the entrances to the sewer system running beneath the city.

  Under the Empire, improved sanitation had become increasingly common.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Among the many civic projects instituted over the last 175 years was the construction of proper sewer systems in most major cities and even in a number of smaller towns.

  However, there was one major problem to a sewer system, the Empire existed in a world saturated with mana.

  While a fair amount of monsters were born though non magical copulation.

  They could also be formed by ambient mana that pooled naturally in most areas.

  In most cities this wasn't a concern since living bodies absorbed mana naturally, and most cities had extensive mana-tech infrastructure that constantly siphoned excess mana from the surrounding environment.

  But below ground was another matter entirely.

  People passed through rarely and even the most carefully etched mana suppression runes degraded over time.

  To maintain a perfectly sterile manaless environment underground would have required a fortune greater than most noble houses possessed and even then, it would have only delayed the inevitable.

  So, the Empire had compromised by having their sewers divided into two distinct layers.

  From homes, bathhouses, and workshops, waste flowed through narrow six-inch pipes into the main sewer.

  These pipes were fitted with heavy iron grates to prevent anything larger than a small rat from ever crawling back up.

  Below that lay the main tunnels.

  They were vast, arched stone corridors, tall enough for carts to pass through and wide enough for small fighting formations.

  They served multiple purposes from managing storm surges, to allowing maintenance crews access, and, when necessary, giving adventurers room to work.

  On a fixed schedule, adventures were hired and sent below to thin out the monster population.

  Thus, normally, such procedures passed without incident.

  Sewer hunts were often just dull, predictable affairs that were forgotten as soon as they were finished.

  But at Guard Post Tavis, things had begun to go wrong.

  It had started quietly with the guards checking on the basement reporting noises coming from the sewer entrance below the post.

  The sounds were soft at first and easily dismissed as rushing water.

  Then the sounds grew clearer. With scratching and then the unmistakable patter of claws against masonry.

  The basement was checked and rechecked, yet every day the noises remained and were getting louder.

  Within days, complaints began arriving from the surrounding streets.

  Shopkeepers spoke of scratching beneath their floors.

  Homeowners swore they heard something gnawing on the grates that covered their pipes.

  But most troubling of all was the sudden surge in the rat population above ground.

  They poured out of alleyways and storm drains in unnatural numbers.

  They were also bolder and more aggressive than usual.

  As if driven upward by something far worse lingering below.

  By the third night, panic had begun to spread through Guard Post Tavis itself.

  Guards slept in shifts whether they were scheduled to or not, weapons kept close at hand.

  A few claimed they felt vibrations through the stone floors that could not possibly belong to rats alone.

  After 4 days of this a report was sent straight up to the Lord Mayor of the district.

  What followed was a week of quiet deliberation and increasingly frantic internal correspondence among the lord mayor and his council.

  Officially, nothing was wrong.

  With no announcements being made and no alarms being raised.

  Thus, when the quest posting finally appeared at the Adventurers Guild, it was carefully worded to appear as mundane as possible and just look like another routine sewer hunt with a minor adjustment to the schedule.

  Unofficially, emergency coin had been authorized without debate.

  The purge was not even scheduled for another 3 months.

  According to the city’s own records, ambient mana levels in the sewers should not yet have been high enough to support accelerated monster growth and certainly not on this scale.

  The numbers did not add up.

  Something was generating mana faster than the suppression devices could drain it, or something had increased the ambient mana exponentially.